‘David Brent: Life on the Road’ Is Cringe Comedy from a Master of the Genre

It’s sometimes hard to look at David Brent for more than 15 seconds at a time before turning away. It’s a self-preservation instinct more than anything. The vicarious embarrassment radiating from Brent after every strained, tasteless office joke, every over-explained reference, every awkward social interaction — as one of the characters in David Brent: Life on the Road explains, it’s excruciating.

Life on the Road sees Ricky Gervais returning to the role of David Brent that he made famous with the groundbreaking BBC cringe comedy The Office. David was the epitome of the terrible boss: needy, fickle, incompetent, fancied himself a comedian, fancied himself a people person, desperate for his employees to like him, but utterly willing to demean anyone at a moment’s notice. David was a nightmare, and in the faux-documentary world of The Office, when the series ended, David exited the world of regional paper-company management and decided to make his dreams of pop stardom come true.

Now, some thirteen years later, those fake documentary cameras are following David Brent once again. And the more things change, the more they stay the same. No longer a manager at the Slough branch of Wernam-Hogg, David is a traveling salesman for a pharmaceutical company. He still tries too hard; he’s still inappropriate at work. His cubicle-mate, Nigel (played with off-color exuberance by the wonderful Tom Bennett) joins David in making inappropriate jokes, but other than that, David is just as adrift in his new life as he was in his old one. The only difference is that David is also sad and cringey as a weekend-warrior lead singer of a band he’s pulled together to go “on tour.” Which in this case means playing a series of mostly-empty rooms while the rest of the band looks mortified. It’s the life David Brent was always keen on living.

“It’s mainly worse because the world’s worse.” That’s how one of David’s co-workers describes this new documentary that David is filming. The co-worker is concerned because David has no idea how he’s being once again set up for ridicule. This time, he’s not even the boss. But she’s right, of course. The world that David Brent: Life on the Road exists in is harsher, meaner, more desperate. And David is still just singing his dumb songs and making horrible racist jokes about Asians at work. He deserves everything he’s about to get, and yet you do feel sorry for him a bit.

The special alchemy of David — and of Ricky Gervais’s performance, which is now cemented as the great and definitive work of his career — is that he will make you feel for him once or twice within the span of an hour, but the rest of the time it is just a relentless assault on your empathy receptors. Whether he’s over-explaining the lyrics to a song he’s dedicated to disabled people (“whether mental in the head or mental in the legs”), performing a power ballad about Native Americans, or accidentally injuring someone in easily the best t-shirt-cannon gag since The Simpsons bumped off Maude Flanders, it’s impossible to watch David do his thing without feeling the sharp pangs of vicarious shame.

This was always where the British Office felt more admirable than the American one: Americans can only hold their hand over the flame for a moment before pulling back. Gervais holds his audience’s hand over the flame for, in this case, 96 minutes, forcing you to look straight into David Brent’s talentless, needy soul. You feel lucky when you make it out alive.